A giant charity

When Jerseyville police officer Nathan Miller was injured during a shootout with a burglary suspect on June 13, Jonathan Farris decided to do something about it.

“Whenever I heard the news about the officer in Jerseyville being wounded in the line of duty, I did what I could to make this a fundraiser on his behalf,” the Alton Giant Baseball Club captain said.

Giant, a vintage baseball team, teamed up with the Belleville Stags and the St. Louis Unions to form a 3-team round-robin tournament at Rock Spring Park on June 24 to raise funds for Miller. There was also an auction for autographed baseballs and T-shirts.

“We’re all out here for a good cause,” Giant player Mike McCauley said. “We wanted to make sure that we don’t take for granted all of the officers and all of our first responders that fall in the line of duty.”

For 4 hours, fans got to see players dress up in vintage uniforms and play under the rules and customs of 1858, also known as the knickerbocker rules. No gloves were used, pitchers threw underhand and players rang a cowbell every time they scored a run.

“This is not your average Joe beer league kind of a thing,” Farris said. “Yeah, it’s competition, but we are gentlemen and ladies who play. We try to incorporate the history of baseball in its infancy. We all enjoy it. It doesn’t matter what the score of the game is, we’re all having fun out here.”

Farris said he hopes to have another fundraising event for Miller in August at Jerseyville.

“Whenever the game at Jerseyville is, we will have stuff for auction,” the captain said. “We’ll have a 50/50 raffle and we’ve got items from all three clubs that we would raffle off and whoever (teams) is available for that day, we would have something for them to raffle off as well.”

In October, the team had a fundraiser during the Olde Pie Towne Festival in Alton. They raised funds for Backstoppers in honor of Blake Snyder, a St. Louis County police officer and Alton High School graduate who was shot and killed that month.

“We had home-baked pies and we raised almost $800 for Blake,” Farris said.

The team is playing its second season. Besides McCauley, other players include Alaina Laslie, Shawn Laslie, Caden Laslie, James Gelvin, Will Grunden, Nick Ramirez, Wendy Hager and Nathan Woodside. The Giant is one of 400 vintage baseball teams in the country.

“We appreciate new teams like the Alton Giant,” said Matt Moushey, one of the St. Louis Unions players. “It’s good to have new ballclubs pop up. Alton is such a great area that it deserves to have a vintage baseball team.”

Hager, who grew up in Las Vegas, had never played baseball until she joined the team last year.

“I love it,” she said. “I saw this when they did in an exhibition game 2 1/2 years ago or something, and I fell in love with it. When I saw that they did this, I just wanted to play.”

Ramirez, who graduated from East Alton-Wood River in 2006, got interested in playing for the team when he attended a game with his father last year.

“They were a new club and they need some new people, so they asked me if I wanted to play,” he said.

The team’s season starts in mid-March and ends in October. They’ll have a game July 8 against the St. Louis Brown Stockings at Rock Spring Park.

“We try to not to play every weekend because that wears us out,” Farris said. “We play like every other weekend. We do travel. The furthest that we would travel this year will be Decatur.”